The Joy of Killing Read online

  The rattling again, fainter this time, as if whatever it is has retreated to some corner in the cellar.

  So the boy in the train is just a boy and does not know what ails him, for in his mind at that moment nothing ails him. What is happening he hasn’t even dreamed of, and he doesn’t know to worry that it might never happen again or about how it’s going to feel when the train ride is over.

  I CLOSED MY eyes as her head descended again. I understood that I would go off when she decided, and not a moment sooner or later, and that was OK. I wondered if I might be able to count this as my second blow job, inasmuch as my dick had gone almost completely soft during the holdup. I had no idea what was in her mind right now; she could be comparing my dick to the size of her boyfriend’s. The girl paused, as if hearing my thoughts. This time she left her hand at the base of it and went down until her mouth bumped into her fingers. I was suddenly overcome not just by what was happening but the idea of what was happening. The hardest to fathom was the girl; she was enchanting, with soft lips and lovely, uncertain eyes. That was why she chose me tonight; she saw something not quite right.

  I’m caught in the image of the blonde hair splayed on my lap, rising and falling to some unheard rhythm, when another image, startling in its clarity, intrudes into the story. There it is, shining like a black pearl in white sand: my first wife on her hands and knees on the bedroom floor, with my best friend poised behind her. He is inserting his cock slowly, carefully into her. One hand reaches around for a handful of hair, and the other palm pushes down squarely on her ass. She backs into his cock and winces. After four or five thrusts, he reaches around and grabs her tits. He begins fucking against his hands. Her face is frozen in a noiseless cry, and he can see it because he has her facing the mirror on the closet door.

  The three of us had come back drunk from a party, and I’d made us another round of drinks. Half an hour went by, and my wife said she was wiped out and going to bed. After a few minutes, my friend went to the kitchen to get more drinks. Minutes passed, and more minutes, and I didn’t hear anything. Finally some dim alert sounded in my brain, and I rose and glanced in the kitchen—no friend, no drinks. I heard sounds coming from down the hall, like some sort of assault. I proceeded down the hall, until I came to the bedroom door. It was half open. I pushed it a few inches more. When I saw him poised over her like that, I could also see the rubbery outlines of her pussy, and I figured from the look of it and the position they were in that he must have started fucking her the moment he walked in.

  That image is one that never mutates or blurs or bleeds or decolorizes. Vivid and sharp, willing to materialize at the best or worst of times. He pulled his cock out so just the tip of the head remained inside. My wife shook her ass, and he pushed in knowingly, as if he had been fucking her for years, and I wondered if perhaps he had been fucking her for years. He caught me looking at them in the mirror, grabbed her ass and squeezed hard as if to confirm that it belonged to him now. These images live on in a world of their own, appearing without regard to what I’m doing or thinking or what else might be in my head at the moment or the consequences thereof. There is never anything I can do about it, except, as in this case, try to limit the intrusion to one image, or two, rather than running the whole tape through to the very end where she is crying and begging him to come and finally his body clenches and he bellows like a wounded bull. Just like the image of the gray fedora and the fleshy creased face below it could seep into the most innocuous moment and leave in me the realization that most likely the sights and sounds of that scene would accompany me to the grave. I sometimes saw it as a form of insanity, the unwelcome intrusion of another reality into my own; although on occasion I would let the sights spin on their own way so it would be me behind my wife, slamming in and jarring her head down onto my friend’s cock. The details and vividness of it felt as real as anything else in my life. I had learned some resistance to the images of the men at the door—they both wore sport coats, slacks and ties, cheap Sears stuff, except for the fedoras—but it always gave way in the end, and more pieces hooked together, and the colors grew shaper, and the voices more distinct, and the look on my mother’s face more disgusted. I can feel it in my gut, as I sit here writing. And you can see another serious problem with this porousness: it flavors and affects everything else I’m doing or thinking about. Like now—the image of my wife and friend is severely interfering with my recollection of that night on the train and my ability to relive it here on paper, which is troubling, because over the years the train ride has come to mean a good deal more to me than my first wife, and, although you can never be sure, I think it’s been immune to the ravages of time and experience. The girl’s lovely face is as smooth and flawless as Chinese porcelain. There’s little to do about the intrusion, except to let it run its course and try to hold onto some slender thread of consciousness in the meantime.

  I PUSH MY chair back and stand. I feel a draft rising from under the door and listen closely for the rattling sounds. I walk around the desk to the window, hoping that this slight change of atmosphere will allow space for the girl on the train to reemerge and for us to continue our drama unalloyed. The oval-shaped window, framed in wood, grows larger as I approach. Through it I see the moon, now lit with fire, has reached the middle of the sky, halfway between the top of the world and the icy waters below. The branches of the tall oak are motionless. I remember the follies of the wind here: from a dead stillness to a raging gale in a couple of breaths. The garden wall, constructed over a century ago of lake rock, casts a shadow over the garden. Just beyond the wall, out of view, is a cliff, and thirty yards below that lays a necklace of sharp rocks barely submerged in the black water. The lake itself is so large there is no distant shoreline. In summer storms, sailing boats overturned and people drowned. Our parents rented this house every August for all the summers of my youth. In my old room, one floor below where I’m standing, I’d found the gooseneck lamp on the same table where it had always been. My chair by the window where I used to sit and watch the moon rise was gone.

  Our father always reminded us first thing on arriving here that we were never to climb the wall or play on the cliff or on the rocks below it. So we took our lunch sacks and fishing poles and walked a quarter mile down the dirt road to a bay, where a river ran into the lake and formed a small beach.

  Back then, the door to this room, at the bottom of the stairs, was always locked, as was the door to the cellar. We never knew where the people who lived here went in the summer, or what they thought of us, the family who took over their house every August and sat at their table and slept in their beds and used their toilets. The house has been vacant and unused for years, I overheard today at the little grocery in town. Too run down, too costly to fix up now. I found my way to the place just as daylight was beginning to fade, after visiting the bay down the road, where I saw that the rope we rode out over the river had been taken down, although you could still see the groove carved in the sturdy tree limb arched over the water. The north woods lake water was cold as ice, even in August, although it didn’t seem to bother us, or if it did we didn’t let it show. First one in. Last one out. The trick on the rope swing was to let go at the very peak, so you flew as far and high as possible, but still managed to land short of the submerged branches on the opposite bank. I zero in on the face of the boy as he approaches the rope swing for a flicker of knowing. I see nothing. From the looks of him, approaching six feet, butch cut, ribs sticking out, gold ring with a glass ruby on his right hand, this is about a year before the girl on the train, and a couple years after the detectives. And yet not a glimmer, not here, in the warm summer sun. Hour after hour we played, until our father came to fetch us home. It was moments like this, when you look back closely and don’t see confirming details, that you began to doubt the whole story and think maybe it was another conglomeration that your mind had served up and you had come to accept through time and repetition. But not the fedoras, or the girl on the train; I
would swear to death by either one. I could hear right now the dull thrumming of the detective’s voice as he spoke to my mother. The second detective was younger, with a thin mustache and motionless eyes. He took off his dark brown fedora and held it in one hand as my mother stepped back and opened the door for them. The way it plays now, the first man, with the glasses and fleshy face, pulls a wallet from his coat pocket and opens it to show a gold badge, although that might be one of the images that has bled in over time. The girl on the train happened because I can remember the smallest detail of it, such as the raw look of her mouth when she finally lifted her head from my lap, although as I’ve said, I don’t doubt a few details might have dropped in; perhaps the ticket punch in the conductor’s hand, or the baby crying.

  I would stand on the bank in the sun, dripping wet, and feel the warmth of the summer wind slowly drying the drops on my skin, and you might think that in an unprotected moment like that something from the past might slip through. Maybe it was the power of the adolescent mind to believe that once you get the rock out of your shoe the pain was over. Maybe I was so happy in those days at the lake that the past simply didn’t exist. After lights-out, I would bend the gooseneck lamp down low to the bedside table and in the glow of it masturbate to a girl in one of the magazines I’d brought from home. Unimpeded in the slightest by images of whatever had gone before. This place, the bay, the house, the pathways along the lakeshore, with its evening-long lingering sunsets, had seemed separate and safe from the outside world of remembrance.

  It’s early autumn now, a time we were never here. The days are shorter, and the evening winds are sharper, and the moon sits higher in the sky. The edges of the oak leaves are just beginning to turn. A boy drowned in the lake one summer. His family lived a couple of houses down, closer to the bay where we swam. The canoe tipped over a ways out and the boy disappeared. I can see his face now—straw-colored hair, freckles—and even remember his name. Joseph. Not Joe. Joseph. From the porch we watched the boats dragging the lake; we were sent to bed when it was still light, and I could hear the motors chugging as I drifted off. The next morning I was scared to go to the lake for fear of seeing Joseph in the water, but he was found washed up in a woody tangle half a mile down from our little bay. Blue and with his eyes stuck open, we’d heard. I’d almost forgotten the incident until early this evening, when the caretaker and I were standing on the porch in the failing light. He was holding the large set of house keys, flicking one after another on the brass ring, and at one point his eyes locked on me. I remembered Joseph then. The caretaker was his father.

  I STEP BACK, allowing the oval window to again frame the night scene. The moon has split the lake with a bright golden stripe. I sort through, as I have for the past several weeks, the threads of cloth to find the one connecting to the gray fedora. The first time the hat appeared, I think, was, during the wedding ceremony for my first marriage. A woman standing to the side of the altar was singing “Amazing Grace,” and one of the notes must have sounded like our old doorbell, because suddenly the door opened and there the detective stood, in his hat and ill-fitting sports jacket, solemn eyes appraising the situation. The scene rolled on for a few frames—my mother backed up a step and turned and called over her shoulder to my father, who was in the den—until I sensed the looks of both the minister and the bride. My friend, the guy who would fuck the bride a few years later, held out the ring for me to take and slip on her finger. Everyone was smiling, so I smiled, too, in spite of the fading image in my head, which I finally managed to obscure by focusing on the small projections on the front of the bride’s wedding dress.

  “COME BACK,” I murmur. I sit back down at the typewriter and settle my fingers on the keyboard. The girl slowly raised her head up until my dick popped out of her mouth; and—I mean this literally—I felt an intense pain as the cool air rushed the head. Her lips pressed into mine. I reached my right hand under her sweater and ran it up the flesh until I came to the soft mound.

  She sat up and slowly lifted her sweater over her breasts. I glanced around, then back: even in the diffusion I could see that the breasts were perfectly symmetrical and several shades lighter than the rest of her. The nipples were more button-like than I had imagined, a little darker, as was the surrounding area. “Jesus,” I whispered. She pulled the sweater up a little further, and my hands rose slowly and reached for them, fingers spreading as if to pluck fruit from a tree. I gently bunched each breast between my thumb and fingers until the nipples protruded out like dark cannon on a hilltop. I looked for a difference between them, but they were identical. My eyes shut just as my lips closed on the tip of the left nipple, and then moved down a little, and then a little further, until the entirety of it was in my mouth. It felt different than it had in my fingers; not smooth and perfectly shaped by a potter’s hand, but with tiny crevices across it and rough edges around it. I began sucking on it, like a baby. There was a little shiver in her chest. My lips found the tiny bumps at the base. A slight move by her pushed her other breast a little closer to my mouth. I abandoned the left nipple and slid my mouth an inch or two over, until I was hovering over the other. She tapped my head lightly, and I hesitated another second. I bit down, and the girl’s chest bucked a little, and she gave a muffled cry, and her chest bucked again. She turned to me with her other breast in her hand and pushed it into my mouth. I bit down on the nipple. She froze in midair for a moment, then released, and her breastbone banged into my nose.

  WHAT WAS THAT? A scraping sound? Like a heavy object being dragged across the floor. I close my eyes and listen closely: nothing. Old houses are full of noises. I had checked in the closets and under the beds, even the fruit cellar around back. Everyone is gone now. I’m carrying forth alone, and I’m tired. I can see my mother standing at the kitchen counter in her apron, cutting brightly colored vegetables on a board and humming quietly to herself. Joseph had been in our kitchen more than once for snacks after a day at the water. My mother loved to ruffle his thick sandy hair. I don’t remember her, or my father, mentioning his name afterward.

  The innocence the boy on the train wears as a cloak doesn’t seem like that to him now; he feels clumsy and awkward and ignorant; but the girl sees it, and it draws her to him. She is used to boys seeking to devour her in one bite, and in his hesitation she sees sweetness, perhaps even caring.

  I cherish the story of the night on the train, not only for its own sake, but because it’s clear to me now that the telling of it is the only way to reach the finish line before the dawn.

  I turn the light out and listen. Nothing. Through the window I see that night’s black canopy has been punctured by a shower of tiny diamonds. Clouds sail beneath the moon, now a whiter shade in the glow of the stars, and cast their own shadows across the lake. There is time left, I think, but not a lot. I wonder, as I have before, what the boy would’ve been like if he had never lost the story of the detectives at the front door and what had gone before. Once the membrane is breached, there is little to be done. No repair. No healing. For some, the best way is to die before the roiling images burst through. As for me, the boy on the train, or the unsuspecting groom at the wedding ceremony, the future was long ago foretold. My father, in his slacks and summer shirt, came to the door in his usual pleasant attitude, which became grim as he listened to the detective. The first one, I noticed, did not remove his fedora until he had come inside and stood in the foyer with his partner. My mother’s face was stricken. She glanced at me, as if she wished she could tell the two men they had made a mistake, there was no boy by that name living here. Neither of the men looked in my direction, as if not wanting to scare me into flight, but I noticed that the lead guy switched to talking to my father. I saw a thin fold of skin, or a scar, beneath his left ear, running down almost to his chin. I lit a filter cigarette with a silver table lighter and tried to listen. Both men were inside now, hats off, held in one or both hands, and now the second one, on the right, with motionless eyes and small ears set too f
ar back on his head, spoke, and in his quiet words I could make out the name of my best friend, David. My heart lightened; David and I had done a lot of shit together, stealing watches from department stores, cartons of cigarettes from grocery stores, even his parents’ car in the middle of the night, which we joy-rode around Booneville smoking and bullshitting about stuff we’d done with girls. But that wouldn’t account for the look of disgust on my mother’s face, or the pain on my father’s, or the dull undertone of the detective’s voice. I crushed the lousy-tasting weed in a blue glass ashtray on the coffee table. I pulled a Lucky from the flattened pack in my jeans pocket, straightened and plumped it, and lit it. I exhaled and out of habit blew several smoke rings, which charged one after the other to the center of the room, where they hung in a row, until the last one blew through the first and settled down on the couch. The second cop caught it, and he seemed to calculate what sort of attitude they had here. Suddenly, all four of them were looking at me, and the lead detective stepped into the living room. Followed by my mother.